THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 4, 2016
41
"We tried to sophisticate mezcal, but it
turned out that people like traditional
things the most," he told me.
The mezcal boom coincides with the
popularity of farm-to-table food, the
rise of the craft cocktail, and the advent
of the bartender as an advocate for en-
vironmental and social justice. Lopez
told me, "Mezcal hits every magic
word---artisanal, organic, gluten-free,
vegan. It comes from a small village,
and you have to drive there to get it. It's
made by a family. It automatically be-
came cool when knowing what you eat
became cool. Tequila got to the point
where it's like Tyson chicken---that's
Cuervo. Now I want to know my chick-
en's name. That's mezcal."
Mezcal's ascent is both a victory for
those who love it and a cause for con-
cern.The grains for whiskey are planted
and harvested each year; grapes are pe-
rennials. But most agaves---succulents,
kin to asparagus---resist domestication.
Espadín, one of the easiest to grow, takes
up to a decade to mature, and each
piña---the usable core, stripped of its
spiky blades---yields only about ten bot-
tles of mezcal. Prized wild varieties can
take longer and yield less. Tobalá, a tiny,
feisty plant that grows under oaks on
high-altitude slopes and secretes an en-
zyme that breaks down granite, needs
as many as fifteen years, and gives up
about two bottles of mezcal per piña.
Tepeztate ripens over a quarter century.
The desire to consume a botanical time
capsule is fraught; every precious sip
both supports a traditional craft and
hastens its extinction. "I truly believe
mezcal will be big everywhere, because
it's delicious,"Josh Goldman, a Los An-
geles bar consultant, told me. "Though
there may be a subconscious thing going
on---see it or eat it before it's gone."
Throughout its history, mezcal---
which is, at heart, homemade hooch---
has periodically been banned, restricted,
penalized, and suppressed. Its new aficio-
nados appreciate the outlaw status: the
more illegitimate a mezcal is, the more
legit it is. (A popular brand memorial-
izes its cross-border-smuggling origin
story in its name: Ilegal.) With so much
mezcal in the marketplace, seekers must
work harder now. One evangelist, who
travels back and forth from Mexico with
a suitcase full of esoteric mezcals, told
me that his favorite distiller works in a
village three hours on a bad road from
Oaxaca City. He gave me a phone num-
ber but warned me that probably no one
would answer.
At Guelaguetza, Lopez showed me
a prized bottle, which she acquired at a
tasting six years ago and had been nurs-
ing ever since. Only an inch or two was
left. "It is everything you would want in
a mezcal," she told me. "It is from a wild
agave. The batch was only forty litres. It
was distilled in clay. It was macerated
by hand. It was fermented in leather.
Nobody had that." She poured some
into a jícara, the dried hull of a fruit,
often used to serve mezcal, and o ered
it to me. It was tangy and slick, like a
dirty Martini, with a whi of neat's-foot
oil. "Mezcal doesn't taste like this any-
more," she said. "You can't order this
anywhere. You have to go to these places.
You have to drink it hot o the still."
T going down when I
landed in Oaxaca City, a cluster of
pastel plaster, flanked by mountains.
Lipstick-red flame trees were in bloom,
and the air was filled with the intoxi-
cating smell of gasoline. Twenty-five
hundred years ago, the Zapotec people
built Monte Albán, a monumental city
on a hill outside town; they worshipped
a bat god and a human-jaguar-snake
god, who brought rain and lightning.
The Aztecs overtook the region, and
then Oaxaca fell to Cortés, but the ge-
ography made colonialism a challenge.
Sixteen indigenous languages are still
spoken, and town names tend to be half
Spanish, half something else---the ca-
pitulation of some royal bureaucrat pre-
served forever on the map. Oaxacans
practice a spunky form of Catholicism:
in some villages, saints who fail to grant
favors risk getting slugged by their pe-
titioners. Eating psilocybin mushrooms
is accepted as a spiritual rite; if that isn't
your thing, four glasses of the agave beer
known as pulque will reportedly deliver
similar results. Even in the city, the cul-
ture remains stubbornly rural. At Casa
Oaxaca---where René Redzepi, Alice
Waters, and Rick Bayless like to eat---
Alejandro Ruiz serves the pre-Colum-
bian food of his country childhood: local
herbs, exquisite moles, crickets, worms.
The society is so traditional, Ruiz says,
that "our competition is mama."
Mezcal is integral to life in Oaxaca. It
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